The Virtue Thieves
by jennymercer
Summary: Tabitha, drowned at 17 during the Salem Witch Trials, lives her afterlife as a succubus; her beloved partner, Sam, is an incubus. Together they make the rounds in Lowell, MA, creating supernatural "cambion" children in unsuspecting dreamers- until one night when, faced with a drowning child, Sam makes a choice that forces them to flee. Rated M, with the MA version on blog.
1. Chapter 1

The Virtue Thieves

by Jenny Mercer

A human being can hold her breath for a long time. I remember, as the chair to which I was tied bounced wildly through the air as the townsmen rolled its catapult-like apparatus toward the pond, I took a deep breath at the sight of the water and then closed my eyes. The chair clunked down, the icy pondwater enveloped me, and my fingers scrabbled helplessly against wood and rope as I held on and on and on. For a few moments I believed I could endure it until the end, although, of course, nobody can. Not even me.

I was an easy target, as any girl in Andover would have been that year if she was unpopular and her mother was a midwife. I wasn't a witch, and the evidence for that proved convincing: lashed to the dunking chair, a witch would have been able to prevent her own drowning. Instead I was only a seventeen-year-old girl, one whose mother was already jailed for the same crime, jolting across the meadow with her wrists tied to a chair intended to extract a confession, but which would instead send her to a death that wasn't really a death at all.

You see, the world is made of three realms and four elements. Earth and air, fire and water- everybody knows these are the pure, familiar things that make up our world. When a spirit is torn away from its body and begins its ascent toward the celestial realm, some- especially those of the young- will grab for any hold on the terrestrial world like a climber slipping down a sheer face of rock. It's a fruitless effort, of course, in that the body cannot survive, but by grasping the anchor of the nearest element, the spirit can win a sort of consolation prize. The angels retreat, the heavenly door closes, and the spirit is left in the in-between realm: the magical world, where earth and spirit smolder against the energy of one another, creating a dimension both unnatural and unholy. Those who clung to the air become ghosts; those who grabbed at the earth, fairies. But the ones who reached out and found water or fire- those lucky spirits become like me and Sam, the very favorites of every human, and the ones most often believed to be a fantasy.

I read all kinds of books, usually battered old novels with creased and cracking spines and loveworn corners, which I found in boxes at yard sales and community fairs. I'd read all the _Clan of the Cave Bear_ books, which took a place among my favorites; they utterly captured my imagination because for once they were about a time period I hadn't lived through. I could relate to them, too, in the parts where the humans and Neanderthals get together, because there's a taboo edge to that and I do love a taboo edge. Everybody does, whether they admit to it or not. You have it on my good authority.

Often, when I padded into bedrooms at night, I'd see on the nightstand the books belonging to the man's wife or girlfriend. Sometimes, if I was really curious, I'd flip them over and read the back covers. And every now and then I felt the urge to shake the men awake and ask, "hey, what does your girlfriend think of this one," but I knew that would be the most ridiculous thing to do, so I never dared. Instead I just filed away the most interesting-sounding titles in my mind, and often they turned up in the library-sale boxes eventually, even twenty years later.

I lived in Lowell, a city a little to the west of the Andover of my youth. Lowell has really grown up; when I first moved there it was just a wild Massachusetts field with heaps of bricks piled around on it and boatloads of Irishmen building the factories and canals all day. The city got taller, and other immigrants came in: Germans, French Canadians, beautiful tall Swedes and dark Portuguese men, all flooding into the town to work in the textile factories. I lived in a worker's tent with Alexander, my first love, and we blended in. It was a lovely life. Sometimes in the late evening I'd walk down the street, jostled on both sides by all the men and women coming off their shifts at the factories, and I'd feel very excited about the bold new world we were building here in Lowell- we, as a nation. Now and then a man would meet my eye and give me an uneasy stare- the old _don't I know you_- and I would lift my chin and gaze back affronted, as if I were an ordinary woman. Alexander, if he were beside me, would suppress a giggle- and not always very well.

But Alexander was gone now, and I lived with Sam. The top floor of the abandoned factory in which we lived was a grand space: smoky shattered windows rising twenty feet into the air, crumbling red-brick walls, and a splendor of old metalwork set in around the doors and staircase. We had a couple of wool blankets tossed into one corner for a bed, and a lot of paperbacks stacked along the wall. Half-reclining onto the blankets, with my back against the rough brick, I could watch morning emerge through that glorious wall of glass: the misty light creeping in through the darkness, first at the bottom, then turning the whole sky midnight blue before the triumphant burst of daylight shoved the night aside like a stage curtain. Waiting up, I knew Sam would be home at any moment. With no need for a flashlight any longer, I opened my dog-eared copy of _The Valley of Horses_ and immersed myself in the Neolithic world again.

Then, footsteps: his. He hopped up the stairs two at a time, the resonant clang against each metal stair becoming a joyful ode to his homecoming. At the top he grinned widely and held out both arms like a magician stepping out before his audience, and I sat up cross-legged on the blanket, smoothing my hair and smiling back.

"My noble hero," I welcomed him. "Back from the hunt."

"And home to Tabitha." He walked over and kissed me above my ear. "How was your night?"

"Very quiet. I read a book. How was yours?"

He pushed a hand back through his thick hair, which now stood up all the more wildly, and shrugged out of his jean jacket, leaving it in a heap on the floor. Between Alexander and Sam there was no good comparison. Alexander was slim and healthily tanned, with chestnut hair and an earnest, farmer-kid face; in the daytime he was a good-looking boy, but too conventional in his looks to do well at night. And then Sam- Sam with his rounded nose and cheeks, his unsettling devilish smile, his skin too pale against the dark shade of his hair and his body short and stocky as a dock worker's- Sam was just ugly enough to be very successful. If at night you dreamed of Sam tearing off your clothes and forcing himself onto you, in the morning you'd shudder and tell no one, deeply ashamed of the animal pleasure you can't help but remember with a jolt of longing. If you saw him on the street you'd look away.

"Fantastic," he said. "Wonderful, curvy woman. Her husband has no idea how much he's neglecting." He doubled back to the staircase and retrieved a paper bag he'd left on the top step, then opened it up and handed me a cold bottle of spring water. "For you, my love."

"Thank you. Did she ask a lot of you?"

He had already unwrapped part of a sausage biscuit and bitten off a large chunk, but he nodded in reply and held up his full hand, all five fingers splayed.

I laughed. "She came five times?"

He nodded again. Through a mouthful of biscuit he said, "I was there for over an hour."

"That was very generous of you."

"I'm an incubus. It's my job." He took another bite and settled wearily onto the blanket. "I do believe I actually need a nap."

"Well, get undressed and I'll cuddle with you."

"It's Wednesday, isn't it? Don't you still do that mall-walking thing on Wednesday mornings?"

I waved a dismissive hand. "It's not important. I'd rather be with you. I missed you."

I pulled my shirt over my head, and he made a throaty noise of approval. "Skin," he said. He set aside the rest of his breakfast, dropped his black T-shirt onto the concrete floor, and came to me. We made love beneath the pale and shattered light of early morning, not because of our natures or the guilt of our sins, but only because we loved each other.


	2. Chapter 2

The Virtue Thieves

by Jenny Mercer

Chapter 2

At the end of the week my friend Meridiana came by as Sam was getting ready to go out for the evening, and I was absolutely delighted to see her. She looked fresh and healthy, if a little irritable; her headful of red hair was sprung with curls, and freckles dotted her porcelain cheeks as if painted there by a dollmaker. For six months she'd been away on some sort of cross-country journey, flowing along from state to state in a quest to find her dream guy, so to speak. I hadn't talked to her in all that time. After all, we don't exactly carry cellphones.

She kissed me on both cheeks and squeezed my shoulders, then turned and did the same to Sam. "How's business?" she asked him.

"Far-flung," he replied. "I can't convince Tabitha to leave Lowell."

"I _like_ Lowell," I protested.

She cocked her head at Sam. "Where are you venturing?"

"_Nashua_," he said, in a voice that suggested this distance was completely absurd. "I keep telling her we need to move to Vermont. The seasons are gorgeous, there are abandoned barns all over the place, and it's still New England. People are discreet. It isn't like in the South-"

I shook my head. "I don't like the men in Vermont. They all remind me of my first partner."

He looked to Meridiana and rolled his eyes. "_All_ of them. Every man in Vermont looks like Alexander."

"I like thicker men." I held out both hands in front of me as if grasping a very large bicep. "Former high-school wrestlers. Steel workers. Not college students who ski on the weekends."

Sam grunted a friendly sigh and kissed me goodbye. As he skipped down the stairs I offered Meridiana a bottle of water and a seat on the concrete. "Why does it smell like rotting food in here?" she asked.

"Sam hasn't taken out the trash. He eats like _crazy_. You should see him pack it away. If he were a human he'd be three hundred pounds by now. He tortures me with all the food he brings home."

"Tell him it's rude to eat in front of you when you can't. He ought to understand that."

"It only really bothers me when it's sushi. Isn't sushi amazing? Like a box of jewels. I just want to buy it at the grocery store and sit it on the windowsill and look at it. But it would start to smell in no time." I sighed. "Why do the incubi get it so good? _I_ want to be made of fire."

She gave me a wry smile. "No, you don't. He can die and you can't, and there's no box of sushi worth that trade." I shrugged, and she said, "Don't be flippant about it. You've got it better than anyone and you ought to appreciate it. It's much better to be a succubus than an incubus. And imagine if you had to be a human again. Or an angel."

"Tell me how the journey went."

She took a swig from her water bottle and looked at it with disappointment. "Don't you have any wine?"

I got up and rooted around in Sam's beneath-the-stairs stash of alcohol until I found a bottle of white wine and a couple of glasses. Neither of us could get drunk, but since wine was a traditionally romantic beverage, he sometimes pulled it out as a gesture of seduction. Also, he could only drink things with alcohol in them- a fuel to counterbalance the quenching effect of the water- so wine was one of the few things we could ingest at the same time. But this was a special occasion, since Meridiana was finally back.

"It went poorly," she informed me as I poured her a glass. "I swear to the Good Lord, Tabitha, in two thousand years this is the absolute worst market I have ever seen. I've been looking since a month after Joseph died- I mean, I wasted no time. I was still mourning him, you know? But you gotta find a partner. A succubus without an incubus is just..."

"A succubus."

"Half of a whole. How are you going to have any more children? You can sleep with all the men in the world, but if you don't have an incubus to help pass along the seed, how is it going to do any good? It's an empty, meaningless existence."

I set the bottle down and sipped from my glass. "Oh, I know. I felt that way after Alexander died."

"And it's bad enough even if you do have a partner. It's practically impossible to get into half the houses in this country these days. No fireplaces, security systems on every door and window, and that stupid Tyvek HomeWrap-"

"I know. It's a problem."

She jabbed at the air with both hands, making her wine jolt wildly in her glass. "That stuff is impossible to penetrate. And even if you _do_ get in, chances are the next night your incubus will hook up with some woman who's taking birth control and that's it! All your efforts for naught."

I shrugged. "It's still fun."

Her aggravated howl seemed to echo along the factory walls. "There's more to sex than _fun_. Especially if you're robbing people for it."

"They don't seem to mind. Don't be so narrowly focused." She shot me a baleful, disbelieving gaze, and I added, "Listen, I love my children. I'm sure I love them as much as anyone does. But all these problems you're listing- yes, things used to be better, but I can't control any of it. You just have to be a leaf on the wind."

"A leaf on the wind." Her voice was flat. "Tabitha, when my last cambion was born, Teddy Roosevelt was still President."

I took a swallow of my wine and regarded her carefully. Meridiana was so much older than me, and sometimes it was hard to relate to her concerns. Her death had been a particularly gruesome one- she had drowned in the town well at the age of nineteen, after a misjudged effort to escape some local boys who were trying to abduct her- and sometimes I wondered if the trauma of it had turned her into such a ball of anxiety. But more often I suspected she had been this same way in life. There's no escaping your true character: you carry yourself with you wherever you go, even into your afterlife.

"I'll tell you what I think," I said, and she sat up a bit straighter. "I think you're like those human women who are approaching menopause and feel like their biological clocks are ticking. Except you're the immortal version of that."

"Tell me something I _don't_ know," she replied.

"Didn't you meet any free-roaming incubi while you were traveling around? You didn't like _any_ of them?"

"I met exactly two. Hardly any men die in fires these days, so the supply is practically nil. And the two I met weren't my type."

I frowned. "What was wrong with them?"

She sighed heavily. "One of them was just- dumb. In life he'd shoveled coal for a living, and you could tell from his conversational skills why he ended up in that line of work. And the other one was like this." She held up her index finger. "Like a pencil."

I set my wineglass on the concrete and stared at her in dismay. "You rejected him because of his _penis_? You must be joking." She shook her head. "You could have any penis in the United States of America any night you want, and you rejected an _incubus_ based on his?"

"I couldn't do it." She set her hands in the same bicep-grabbing gesture I'd made half an hour before and said, "I like thicker men."

"Oh, honestly, Meridiana." I held up both hands in a gesture of bewilderment. "What if he was a fantastic guy? What if he would have loved you?"

"It wasn't meant to be."

I shook my head and reached for the wine bottle again.

"You have no idea how lucky you are with Sam," she said. "He's a wonderful man. So sweet to you. And I bet women just love him."

"They do. He can afford to be picky."

"So lucky," she repeated. "Well, I wish you great joy. Safety for your partner and infinite children for you both."

"Thank you," I said, and when she smiled at me it looked brittle but sincere.

While Sam was out at the movies, I propped our smudgy mirror on a ledge and primped myself for the evening. Years ago, when women were expected to style their hair every day or wear hats or caps, getting glammed up was a more involved process; I had to undo the respectable daytime look, and that took time. Put on the trashy underwear, let my hair down and tease it into something loose and wild, pull out the eye makeup. Now my hair was always down, and by the end of the day it had reached almost the right level of messiness. I put on eyeliner almost daily, and I always wore trashy underwear. Sam liked it. They sold it right there in the middle of the shopping mall, between the Picture People photo studio with its grinning toddlers and a shop selling vampirish garb to teens. Victoria's Secret, undoubtedly the loudest secret ever uttered. My mother would have died.

I leaned into the mirror and streaked an extra line of eyeliner beneath my bottom lashes. Sam, for the second time that week, was seeing one of the _Star Wars_ movies at a grubby theater in a bad part of Lowell, along with probably two hundred other fanboys lining up to see the retrospective. Sam was absolutely _mad_ for _Star Wars_. He saw it as some kind of grand moral allegory, with Yoda and Obi-Wan as the fonts of wisdom and Darth Vader representing man's internal struggle, or something. Every now and then he'd say to me, "You like me because I'm a scoundrel"- quoting Han Solo- or reply to my "I love you" with a grumbly-voiced "I know," and I'd feel like smacking him. It made me miss the days of silent movies, when the worst he could imitate was some slapstick comedy.

At last I opened up the old trunk at the far end of the floor and dug through my clothes to come up with a decent outfit. During the day I could wear anything, but in order for my clothes to follow me around at night- rather than be left behind in a heap when I turned to water to slide under a door, leaving a damp pile resembling a melted Wicked Witch- they needed to have been worn a few times, and thus infused with something of my body. Sam and I could smell each other's clothes and determine whether they were good for prowling, but since a person can't smell herself very well, on my own I had to guess. Shoes were the hardest. Every time I saw a shoe by the side of the road, I knew that somewhere there was a succubus or incubus limping home and cursing under their breath.

Once suitably outfitted, I turned off the lantern and headed out into the warm summer night. Because we're elemental creatures, succubi have advantages in moving from place to place; we're water, and it's much more efficient to go long distances as a puddle in the bed of someone's pickup truck than to walk the entire way. I suppose it's a shapeshifting ability, but not really more so than liquid to ice or steam. Water has a solid stage and a gaseous stage, and in human shape we're simply the magical stage.

I still liked to walk, though. The streets of Lowell weren't entirely deserted; it was only around eleven, and lots of people were still out enjoying the night. For months I'd kept to the city limits when visiting, despite Sam's encouragements to be more adventurous, but that night I'd planned a trip all the way to Boston.

It's a simple technique: cross a road at a stoplight behind a truck headed east, then begin to jump in the bed and land there as water. The driver sees a flicker in his side-view mirror, then assumes he's imagining things. Here's something to remember: you're never imagining things. There's very little true malice in the world, but a great deal of magic.

Once in Boston, back on my own two legs, I hurried along across the web of streets I remembered very well. Into the old apartment building, look around for nosy neighbors, then puddle down and slip beneath the door like a Bible tract. Straightening up in the foyer, I looked around anxiously at first: was this still Cameron's place? And then, blessedly, the reassurance. The wall of books, the sleek sound system, the _Invisible Man_ poster framed in the corner. The venetian blinds, parted, cast bands of light from the courtyard across the darkened living room. The clock read a few minutes past midnight. I walked down the hallway to the cracked bedroom door.

There he slept, his lovely brown arms stretched across the white expanse of his sheets and crumpled featherbed, his back turned upward like one sleeping on a beach. His eyelids were gently closed, and his mouth hung open a bit in sleep, baring the gleaming edges of his straight upper teeth. It had been ever so long since I'd seen him: this man with whom I had two children, who I'd watched grow from a wiry youth barely old enough to get into a bar to this great big bulk of fully bloomed manhood. He was a little softer in the stomach now, but altogether prettier even than when I'd first laid eyes on him, nearly twenty years ago.

I stepped out of my thin shoes and let my sweater fall to the floor, then peeled off my blouse and skirt. I began at the foot of the bed and climbed up to him; without opening his eyes he turned over as I approached, sensing my presence. I stopped at his chest and lingered over the scent of his body: raw beneath, shower-fragrant above, a bite to the neck and a caress of the hip all in one. Succubi get wet quickly, but with Cameron, even faster.

I pressed my body along his and stretched it as I rose, and he opened his eyes. "You again," he said. "Where you been?"

I smiled.

He pushed down the coverlet as a welcome, and I kissed him on the lips, all teeth and tongue. Straddled his hips, felt his inviting upward thrust. Oh, Cameron, you beautiful dark delectable thing, every time leaving me praising the Lord He didn't make me an angel.

I couldn't tell him the truth. That I rarely visited him because it made trouble with Sam, who inevitably bedded with white and Latin women and would leave them with babies they couldn't explain. That he appeared in my daydreams far more often than I could turn up in his nighttime ones. I couldn't tell him anything at all.

But I pushed my panties to the side and eased slowly onto him, and again his eyelids drifted closed. To him this was only a dream; it had to be, for nothing else made sense. At first his big hands cupped my hips as if they were made of glass, but then, driven by instinct, began to roll them in the rhythm that felt right to him. And this was the most difficult part of being one of my kind: to breathe with the waves of spine-arching, toe-curling pleasure, to stay silent, when all magical and human nature demands a scream to bring the building down.


	3. Chapter 3

The Virtue Thieves

by Jenny Mercer

Chapter 3

"How was your night?"

Sam stretched out on the blankets with a bag of corn chips resting on his chest, reading by the light of a pillar candle the comics section of a newspaper propped against his thighs. I was constantly reminding him he should use the battery-operated lantern, because the flicker of candles could attract the attention of the fire department and create an annoying hassle for us. But he was partial to firelight.

"Sublime," I replied.

"Sublime," he repeated. I hung my sweater from a nail above the bed, and his nostrils flared. "_Ah_. Cameron. Couldn't put it off any longer, could you?"

"Sorry."

"It's all right. I'm trying to broaden my horizons." He set the chip bag next to the makeshift bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt.

"Every time I'm with him I think about how horrified my mother would be."

He gave a single bark of a laugh. "Dear Mom, I'm a seed-stealing succubus, but the real shocker is I slept with a black man."

"Oh, I'm fully aware of the irony." I opened a fresh bottle of water and drank deeply from it. I was terribly thirsty. On the way back to Lowell the driver exceeded the speed limit by a wide margin and there was a lot of evaporation.

"You shouldn't allow it to bother you."

"It doesn't bother me. It magnifies the thrill." I drank again and looked out through the big windows over the city. "You know that after all that searching Meridiana still couldn't find a partner? I think she needs to go overseas."

Sam made a rude, disparaging noise. "What a desperate idea. Like resorting to a Russian mail-order bride."

"Not necessarily. I just think she might find more options in a different country."

"Someplace with lots of firetrap slums, like India," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm. "You've got it all wrong. There are plenty of available partners, they just don't want _her_. They probably turn to sparks and hide under rocks when they see her coming."

I clicked my tongue. "Oh, stop. She's beautiful."

"She _is_ beautiful, and she's drowned three of her partners so far. There are lots of beautiful women in the world. I'll stick to the ones who won't kill me."

"She's been around for two thousand years. You have to factor that in."

He shook his head. "_No puede_. I could believe she picked one dud, maybe two. Not three. I don't care what they did, she didn't need to destroy their souls. She's like a Black Widow of the already-departed."

"You might be right."

"Don't get me wrong- I get along with her fine. I just wouldn't want to pair with her. Come here." At his beckoning gesture I sat beside him, folding my legs to the side. "Do you want to make love tonight or tomorrow?"

"We can wait until tomorrow. Promise me you'll find a good match for Cameron again."

"I did last time, didn't I?"

"You did. The baby was beautiful."

"The cambion," he corrected. His voice was gentle. "They're not human babies. You know that."

"But _they_ don't."

"I promise. I'll find someone beautiful and good."

I smiled and laid my head on his chest. When I was a teenage girl I used to imagine what it would be like someday to lay my head on my husband's chest, feel the rise and fall of his breathing. My fantasies didn't go much beyond that; despite that my mother was a midwife, we were Puritans, and the process of getting the babies in there sounded repugnant to my ears. I only wanted to be loved, and to love back. Little did I realize how long love could be, how enduring and free of jealousy and burdensome expectations, once shaken loose from the bonds of mortality.

"I hope you live forever," I whispered.

He wrapped his arm around my body and pressed his lips against my head, not answering because there was no good answer, surely thinking only of the immensity of our risk: that human couples have life on earth and then eternal love in Heaven, but Sam and I have hundreds and hundreds of years, and then, in a flash, nothing.

When the town selectmen first arrested me and charged me with witchcraft, I was noisy in my self-defense, even belligerent. Others had been charged before, only to see their accusers shrink back and recant once they were shamed into a bit of examination of their own souls. I wasn't going to go down without a fight, but the reality surprised me: they were going to make an example of me, and prove that this town took its witch-hunting seriously, whether or not the accused could survive the interrogation as a proper witch would.

With my body immersed in the water, my soul slipped out as if squeezing through a narrow pipe and swam down to the lake bottom to hide. I could see my empty body as a dark silhouette above, surrounded by foggy daylight: my limbs and head hung straight down, as if I were a doll left haphazardly atop a fence. Down at the bottom I wrapped my arms around my knees, and then realized the first thing: that just as my spirit had dictated every action of my body, so had my body informed my soul, and even apart it maintained the shape of it. I had always imagined the soul as a diaphanous handkerchief fluttering at the level of my heart, but now here it was- whole, and entirely different from that, just like a shadow but made of the light of God.

The limp and hanging body jerked out, and a circle of brightness replaced it. At first I thought it was the intrusion of sunlight, but then an angel appeared- a soul like mine, intensely bright, without wings but glowing behind as if they were there. Even now, when I see pictures of the sun's surface- the sweeping, roiling churn of its plasma- I think of that angel.

But I curled back against the mildewy rock behind me. I looked down. And when I felt myself pulled upward like one magnet to another of its kind, I snatched and grabbed at everything in my path- the water grasses, the lake fish, and at last at the water itself, desperate not to go- until the pull broke and I drifted gently back down. When I looked up again there was only the dim sunlight that had been there before, seen through the thickness and sediment of the lake.

I know some humans would ask, why _not_ go to Heaven? Why resist the pull of an angel? And to that I say, if you think it sounds so wonderful, _you_ go there. Get a rope, or a gun, or a bottle of pills, and hie yourself to Heaven right now. Your sins are forgiven, even your last one; there's no asterisk attached to the promises of God. Not too eager? You're hardly alone. The world is a beautiful place, more beautiful even than you know. When Heaven whistles and pats its thigh, not all of us are ready drop our hard-won stick and go bounding back to our creator.

Down at the bottom of the lake, I shivered a long sigh, but no bubbles came out. And then, before my eyes, I saw two unlikely images: a woman in blue, and a dark lizard with an orange-tinted frill around its neck, standing one beside the other. To my Puritan eyes both appeared equally suspicious. The lizard looked for sure to be something of the devil, but the blue-robed woman looked like the Papist idea of Mary, and I knew I shouldn't truck with either one of those. Yet I wouldn't have much choice. Neither was what I first believed it to be, but nevertheless these were the two authorities over what I had just become- the good one and the evil one, sharing custody of all the water spirits in the uneasy truce of a couple with shared custody after a nasty divorce. I could hear their voices speaking to me inside my mind, explaining to me everything that would take me a hundred years to properly learn.

If I had really listened, I probably wouldn't have chosen Alexander. I met him not long after I arrived in Framingham- his farmhouse had burned down, and the woodsy scent of house fire still lingered in his clothes- and I stayed with him for the same reason human girls my age got married: eager for love, and struggling to reconcile the moral teachings of my upbringing with my overwhelming desire to break the seventh commandment. Becoming a succubus is a lot like that television show where the producers drop twenty Americans onto an island and let them fight it out for dominance and prizes. At first they brush their teeth with sticks every morning and use all their politeness words, but by the end they're hunting rats with their fishing spear and snacking on them around the fire, their new dreadlocks tied up beneath a muddy bandanna. Alexander and I, we really tried. We both came from good families.

But Sam. It wasn't long into my widowhood when I climbed aboard the Salem and Lowell Railway for a nice ride; trains were extremely exciting then, and to ride on one was a most enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. When he stepped on and slouched himself into a seat on the end, his black coat rumpled and face bearing a second day of five o'clock shadow, I thought wistfully that if Alexander were still with me, that man would be the one I followed home. I thought he was a human, you see, and I was struggling to exercise some oddball version of chastity, where I wouldn't fornicate with strangers unless I had a partner to help me justify it. It wasn't until the man turned his head and grinned at me that I caught something of the scent of his body- that bit of a blown-out candle beneath the veil of cigarette smoke and the liberal lacing of pheromones intended for human women. And then I knew.

I don't know if there can be such a thing as fate for beings separated from God. In the church of my childhood our minister often preached about predestination, in which God alone chooses who will be saved and who will be damned. The saved ones are subject to_ irresistible grace_: they can't resist the call of the Holy Spirit. Had I been one of those, I never could have ignored the beckoning of that angel, and so I reasonably concluded that I am, and always was, one of the damned. But if damnation was my fate- and Sam's and Meridiana's as well- then all of us operated in the free and formless space _beyond_ fate, where what we do doesn't matter to eternity- only to us.


	4. Chapter 4

Early in the morning, after my night with Cameron, I awoke to Sam's chest warm and snug against my back; his hand stroked down my thigh, while his hips moved in a slow pantomime of what he wanted to do. As I stirred he slipped down and, pushing my panties out of his way, traced his tongue across me with a slow erotic ease that set me moaning. I opened my eyes and saw him grinning, tugging off my underpants and untangling them from my legs, before delving back with an industrious and eager swiftness. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes to block the light; his tongue flickered rapidly, then slowed and meandered. I ran a hard heel down his back and felt my thighs tense against his shoulders; my pelvis lifted, and just before he had me he pulled away and up, bringing the weight of his body over mine. One hard push and he was inside me. I winced a little at his thickness, but his thrusting felt good enough to disguise that first twinge, and my body grappled for the pleasure it had almost had moments before. When the waves of it overtook me I let loose with all the rapturous noise I'd had to conceal the night before, while Sam nuzzled his face against my neck, searching either for closeness or a better angle for his overwhelmed ears.

I gathered my breath, cradling his head against me, and looked up at the ceiling that seemed infinitely high. Boxes of light marched along it from the topmost windows, marking a band of shadow down the center. For a second a memory of Cameron's room fluttered through my mind: the broken light through the Venetian blinds, the ladders they drew against the carpet and wall. It was rooms like that which gave purpose to moments like this one, where through bringing Sam pleasure, he would draw the other man's seed into the furnace of his own body- to be rendered and distilled by the same magic that had created us, so the child born of it would be Cameron's but also, in a small way, ours.

Sam began to thrust again, slowly at first, then as quickly as I urged him. Twice more he brought me to climax, and when my muscles finally went limp he retreated. He kissed down my breasts, swiped a fond hand across my belly, and smiled at me. "Feel better?"

"I think so."

"I hope so. You're soaking wet." He was kneeling in front of me, and I knew he was waiting for me to regather my energy. Missionary sex was the bread and butter of his nights away from me, and he wanted something different when he was home. His eyebrows lifted and fell, communicating impatience and tension. "I need this _badly_."

I rose up on my knees and kissed his mouth, feeling the slow sweep of his hands down my body. I wanted to touch every inch of him: his broad back and trim waist, his sturdy thighs and his darkly flushed, swollen manhood. In our life together I had to share Sam, I had no choice, and I didn't mind; it was our nature, the reason we could be a couple at all. But no woman pleased him like I did, no other woman had earned his ardent love, and every time we came together this way I felt- in the word of my Andover townsmen- _elect_, the only one fortunate enough to have him again and again and again, whenever I wanted.

"How do you want it?" I whispered in his ear.

His voice was as quiet as mine. "Get on all fours."

I turned around and did as he asked. When he pushed into me, his fingertips digging into my hips, I felt his frenzy. As he came he pulled my body so tightly against his that I squeezed my eyes closed at the pressure inside me, but at the end of it he bent his head down to kiss me on the shoulder, soft and tender.

"_That's_ the way to wake up in the morning," he said.

We lay beside each other for a few minutes, watching the wind ruffle the spider webs in the empty panels of the windows, listening to the sounds of traffic beginning to move across Lowell. I asked, "Do you really want to move somewhere else?"

"I want to see more of the country, that's all. I've been around for a hundred and sixty years and I've never seen anything beyond the Northeastern United States."

"I guess I'm to blame for that."

"I didn't say that. But it is true that after I figured out what had happened to me and left New York, I only made it as far as Lowell before you got your hooks in me. I think I just get tired of looking at the same town after a few generations."

"Maybe we could take a vacation."

He grinned. "You don't mean that. I know you're afraid of traveling outside of Massachusetts."

"It's not that I'm _afraid_, exactly. I just don't know my way, and what if I can't figure out how to get back? And what are the people like? I don't want to encounter those, you know, Bible-thumper types-"

"They're easy to avoid."

"To you, maybe, but I don't know for sure how to identify them and it frightens me. It makes me think of the selectmen in Andover. And we have low rates of gun ownership here, and I like that. I want you to be safe."

He threw me a sly look. "Only careless incubi get shot. I'm never careless."

"I like to err on the side of caution." He stood up and began to get dressed, and I rolled onto my side. "Maybe Disney World. We could take the train down. It doesn't get much safer than that, right? And you could see Florida."

He chuckled in disbelief. "Disney World? How on earth would we go out at night there? Every hotel room with an entire family in it- no single people anywhere. We'd go crazy with lust. After three days we'd be biting each other's heads off."

"It isn't _all_ tourists. What about the people who work there?"

He replied with a slow shake of his head as he fastened his belt. "Tabby, there _is_ such a thing as honor among thieves. And of all the things I've done, I'm not going to add 'impregnated the staff of Disney World with demon babies' to my list. There's a limit."

"Well, where did you have in mind to move? Not Vermont. I mean if you could go anywhere you wanted."

He answered without hesitation. "California."

"California? Why?"

His head popped out the top of his T-shirt, and he smoothed down his hair as best he could. "Beautiful people, good weather, and Wine Country. Why does anyone move to California?"

I sat up and scrunched my face into a skeptical expression. "I'd miss seeing my babies."

"Oh, phoo. Most of them don't live around here anyway. And we do have a cambion in California. You didn't know?" I shook my head, and he said, "Your first one with Cameron. The one the mother gave up for adoption."

My breath was a quick inhale as the memory jumped to mind. "Is that where she ended up? How do you know that?"

"Meridiana told me when I ran into her at the bar last night. It got back to her while she was on her grand journey. Apparently it _still_ gets batted around as a cautionary tale." He rolled his eyes. "I learned my lesson, already."

I nodded and, for the moment, couldn't speak. It had felt like a great tragedy, seventeen or so years ago- that Sam had passed Cameron's seed along to a young white woman whose family was aghast when the child was born mixed-race. Sam had reported to me, chagrined, that they had pressured her give up the baby for adoption, and the young mother was deeply bereft over the entire thing. Even though I knew there was no point in my praying anymore, I had asked God's forgiveness for that one. It had made me feel utterly terrible, and after that Sam and I had come to an agreement about exercising extreme caution when it came to such obvious differences.

"Is she all right?" I asked. "The baby?"

"She's fine. Rich parents and healing skills. That's my magical DNA." He made muscle-man arms, and I worked up a smile. "All the most powerful cambions come from my loins."

"All's well that ends well, I suppose."

"Yes indeed." He gave me a quick kiss and shrugged on his jacket. "I'm off for the day. See you this evening."

Gradually I rose and dressed, drinking my morning water while looking out over the city. I thought about California- the scenes I had seen of it in movies and read in books, the memories of items in the news. For so long it had been a distant, fearsome location, with wild and desperate men traveling there to find gold, and all the long-running disagreements with the Spanish and Mexicans, and the frontier towns that were dusty and lawless and filled with people carrying guns. Only about a hundred years ago did it begin to get civilized- recent enough for it to feel tenuous to me. After all, for the average human, if you said, "Oh, that place was a death trap until eight years ago, but now it's lovely"- they'd still be wary of taking a vacation there.

I headed outside and stepped out into the street, feeling the sun warm against my face. The day was mine, and after my conversation with Sam, I was in the mood to see my children. Sam was right- truthfully, very few of the children we had created lived in town, and most were middle-aged or even elderly. The reasons for this were simple: Sam ranged much farther than I did, so most of the babies were born farther away, and of those in Lowell, not many stayed for more than a few years. Crime was high, and mothers worried about that.

But we had one daughter who worked for a day care center nearby and took her charges out to a playground at ten every weekday morning. She was in her twenties, a pretty blond woman with a friendly smile and a special way with animals. One time, as she watched the day care children at play, a stray mutt that had been snarling and snapping at passerby wandered toward the playground. She crouched down and clicked her tongue at it, and it bounded right over to her, all of a sudden as friendly as a child's pet beagle. She held it at her heel, letting it lap at her face, until the Animal Control truck arrived- at which point it returned to snarling and growling at the officer.

Sure enough, as I approached the playground I saw her standing in her lime-green staff T-shirt behind a large group of children clambering over the equipment. I sat on the bench, working to hide a smile; she was so beautiful. I knew her name- Angie- and I remembered her father, a lovely Naval officer who came into town now and then to visit his parents. Over a period of several years, I'd catch sight of him in the coffee shop, but I kept sneaking into his room just a day or so too late. At last I caught him in the guest room- the door cracked, his aging father in the room at the end of the hall sitting up late to watch television- and decided the risk was worth it. I took him very quietly, pressing my hand over his mouth at the end so he wouldn't make a sound, and never forgot the beauty of his pale, solid body.

Her mother was a waitress in a questionable restaurant- the kind where the management makes the women wear tightly pulled tank tops and the shortest of shorts. Sam could really be such a pig sometimes. I remembered watching Angie and her mother walk to her preschool, the mother in a trenchcoat and Angie in a polka-dotted plastic raincoat, splashing through the puddles in her boots with handles at the top to help her pull them on. Her hair was a riot of cornsilk curls then. I'd stepped into an alley ahead of them and melted into a puddle, then ran out onto the sidewalk so the child would have to splash through me. It was a blissful moment, to feel the energy in her little legs, the exuberance of her spirit, and know that I'd had a part in creating her. That Sam and I had been responsible for something so beautiful.

For a long time I watched Angie from the park bench- as unobtrusively as I could, acting as though I were reading the magazine I'd found discarded beside me- and left a few minutes after she lined them all up and walked them back to the center. Her timing was excellent; an ice cream truck arrived just a minute later, which would surely have caused chaos among the kids. As I watched the park's remaining children line up at the ice cream truck, I remembered that the next day was Midsummer- the day of the Census- and I hadn't yet reminded Sam. At midnight on Midsummer- as the hour moved from one time zone to the next around the globe- all of us succubi were obligated to visit the nearest designated lake to be counted by our leaders. Each year they met with us individually, quizzed us on a few basic questions- like a catechism- and sent us on our way. It was traditional for our incubi to accompany us, though non-partnered, free-ranging incubi had no need to attend. To human eyes it would form a lovely scene: the succubi all gathered around the lake as shallow, glittering pools of water beneath the moonlight, each waiting her turn to slide in; their partners lingered in trees and bushes as tiny, smoldering sparks, looking for all the world like fireflies standing still among the foliage. It didn't take very long and, given how independent we all were, it was nice to feel a sense of community once in a while.

A few years ago, though, we all congregated at the designated lake in New Hampshire- every succubus in all of New England- to discover that the area had been taken over by some sort of human fairy convention. The grass around the lake was packed with humans wearing wire-rigged wings and pointed plastic ears, silky costumes, or cobbled-together outfits from Renaissance Faires; loud Irish music played, and trucks cooking Italian sausage and funnel cakes were parked around the perimeter. We all lingered there at the edges of the scene, unsure of what to do; we couldn't communicate with our partners, but saw their sparks dip on the wind and sink back into the cover of trees as the humans carried on around our lake. At last we all retreated and went home, each worried about penalties or discipline from the leaders, but in the end nothing happened. I suppose they were as surprised as we were. It's the only time I've ever seen a Midsummer Census cancelled, and they next year word spread that it had been moved to a different lake.

When I arrived back at the factory, Sam was sponge-bathing himself with a damp washcloth in preparation for the evening. "Tomorrow is the Census, remember," I told him.

"Yeah, I know." He shot me a sideways glance and a smile. In a jesting voice, imitating the Lady's regal tone, he asked, "What's the Rule?"

"Respect the illusion," I replied automatically. Into that small phrase was packed all that was expected of us: never, by word or action, to indicate to human beings that we are anything other than a character in a dream. Our role, in this tenuous space between nature and heaven, depended entirely upon our discretion. The world was already too full of people like the ones who had dunked me in the pond that last day, convinced that the world was filled with forces beyond their control and intent on destroying them. As pitiful and futile as their efforts were, their attempts disrupted the balance of the world and put innocent people- like my former self- in danger. For that reason, we were always to respect the human illusion that there is nothing more to the world than what they could see with their eyes or read about in the Bible. Violations brought discipline.

"Very good," he said in the same haughty voice. He squirted some body wash from a small plastic container onto the cloth and lathered his arm. "Are you going out tonight too?"

"I think so. I'm in the mood."

"Me too." He shot me his best lecherous grin, and I smiled back. He added, "I think we should catch a movie tomorrow night, before we have to be at the lake."

"Which movie? Not _Star Wars_."

"No, no. That new one about the couple reunited after World War II. The posters show them kissing in the rain. You must have seen them."

"I think so."

He finished soaping his body and wrung out a clean washcloth from the bucket beside him. "We can pick out all the anachronisms and hold hands and make out in the back of the theater like teenagers."

"I _am_ a teenager, technically."

"No, you're not. Not even technically." His smile spread slow and bemused as I grasped his soaped-up privates and gently massaged. "You're an old, old woman."

"Then you're a dirty old man."

He closed his mouth over mine and kissed me deeply, then pulled me against his soapy body despite my squeal of protest. And the frustration was still sweet, that this was the one time I couldn't have him, when he was preparing to give away Cameron's seed in accordance with our own kind's version of natural law.


	5. Chapter 5

Despite my eager mood, the evening's prowling did not go as planned. The man I'd had my eye on for weeks- a tall, towheaded guy in his mid-20s, who often brushed past me near the park on his way to the gym- utterly let me down once I finally worked out a way to get into his house. The place was relatively new construction, and as Meridiana had said, impenetrable to all but the most motivated succubi. I slid in through the leaky basement and up to his room, narrowly dodging a master bedroom that turned out to belong to his parents. He smiled drowsily when I appeared in his dreams, and gamely welcomed my touch. But he was slow to arouse and unimpressive at full strength; his arms rested at his sides as I moved above him, and the orgasm I managed was almost an afterthought. As I pulled my clothes back on, feeling quite disgusted with myself, I reflected that I would have been much better off if I'd just stayed home and waited for Sam. No human man could rival an incubus in the satisfaction department- not even the ones with Viagra running hopefully through their veins- but some of them were downright incompetent even for mortals.

Sam was already home when I returned. He had a little radio on and was listening to music while reading the sports section of the paper by candlelight. "Oh, you're here," I said. "I thought you'd be out much later, since you got such a late start. Did you have a good time?"

"Very satisfying. Enjoyable." He sat up and set the paper aside. "I got to see our other one from Cameron. The little one. Amberlie."

My smile was spontaneous. "Did you! How did you happen to see her?"

"I was hanging out near the house waiting for everyone to go to sleep." I gave him a puzzled look, and he said, "Yes, I know, I'm a cad. The same woman I gave it to last time. She's white, but she always dates black men. I figured she already has one of Cameron's and seems to be happy enough, so why not a second one. So I sat in the woods behind the house and waited for all the lights to go out. Before that happened, though, they had the sprinkler running in the backyard, and the woman was skimming the pool. It looked like she was getting it ready for the summer, now that it's finally getting hot outside. And Amberlie was running back and forth through the sprinkler."

I sat down in front of him. "How old is she now? Five? Six?"

"Something like that. You held out a long time before going back to Cameron- I'll give you credit for that. When I have a favorite I'm back in there week after week until it gets too dangerous." He laughed weakly and rubbed his forehead. "I'm sure they're in their psychiatrists' offices saying, 'Doc, you've got to help me, I can't stop having dirty dreams about this ugly guy.'"

I smiled. "You're not ugly. You're _impish_."

"Sure. Anyway, the child is a beautiful one. Skin like caramel, and hair in these cute little puffs." He gestured orbs above both sides of his head. "She had on this pink swimsuit and was running around squealing. It pains me sometimes, you know. I see them every now and then and I wonder what it would look like if you and I had a real one. One that was half me and half you."

"That would have been impossible," I said quietly. "We were born more than a hundred and fifty years apart."

"I know. It just gets into my head sometimes. You know I've made hundreds of children and never touched one. Not once. And I'm sure I never will. I can't imagine I'd ever have a reason to."

"Respect the illusion," I said.

He smiled sadly. "Yes. Strange men can't walk around patting other people's children. Ah, well." He tore a piece from the edge of his newspaper and, with idle indifference, snapped it between his fingers. It burst into a small and fast-burning flame, then burned out, leaving his fingers dusted with paper ash. "The rare downside to a life devoted to sin. So how did you do?"

I uttered a grunt of disgust, and he chuckled and flicked another bit of paper between his thumb and middle fingers. I watched the flame jump and rush across the paper, then smolder to nothing. "It wasn't even worth the effort. I wanted to kick him."

"We all have nights like that. They can't all be Cameron."

"They can't all be _Sam_. You spoiled me this morning."

His grin was slow and toothy. "I have skills that make mortal men weep."

I held out my hand to him. "Let's go up on the roof. It's almost Midsummer. The moon is nearly full and it looks amazing."

He clasped my hand and I pulled him up. We climbed the ladder to the roof and scraped away the gravel from the flat concrete with our feet. Until morning we lay there watching the sky, my head resting against Sam's stomach, our bodies forming a letter T. From time to time Sam took out a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and smoked it slowly, sending up gray trails that dissipated as soon as they swirled past. I tried to picture the little girl in the sprinkler- to recreate in my mind what he had seen- but every guess seemed wrong, like nothing more than my imagination. I had seen her as a tiny baby, but I couldn't quite fathom what a child of Cameron's would look like. I wished I could.


	6. Chapter 6

Sam, when he worked, put in his time as a housepainter, working for a variety of men who picked up workers in the early morning and paid them in cash at the close of the work day. It was crummy work, but our expenses were few, and a hundred dollars could carry us through two or three weeks without any trouble. Sam ate and drank for leisure; he smoked from long habit rather than addiction, and so when money ran low he simply lived without those luxuries. Many of our kind lived grittier lives- stealing or engaging in small-time versions of prostitution- and we'd both done those things too, but preferred to live above them. When we needed money, he painted. It always worked out.

In my first months with Sam it had surprised me that he was so amenable to an honest life. He'd grown up in an area of New York City known as Five Points, which at the time he lived there- this would have been the 1840s and early '50s- was the most crime and gang-riddled pocket of the city. Orphans slept in every nook and cranny, he had told me; disease rocketed through the tenements with astonishing speed, and drunks were everywhere, knocking into you even on the shortest walk down the street. His own family, fallen into poverty after the death of his father, all hoped to rise above it, but that never happened. In 1852 a fire tore through a rickety block of slum buildings, taking out Sam's entire family and several others. Sam's mother and sisters went to Heaven, and Sam- well, eventually, he went to me.

He was twenty years old when he died, and had made a living in a tannery. He'd hated the work, and told me that following his emergence into the afterlife, felt it may as well be Heaven if he never had to put in a day in the tannery again. Unlike Alexander, who had moped about his fate and often expressed regret that he'd never had the chance to be the farmer he'd hoped to be, Sam was positively joyous about his station in life. As a teenager I'd always thought our church's preacher was full of nonsense, but the afterlife has convinced me beyond a doubt that predestination is true. If ever there were a soul born to be an incubus, it was my Sam. He would have died of boredom in Heaven, and surely his heart was too good for anybody's notion of Hell.

On Midsummer night we walked down to the movie theater to catch the film he'd had in mind; we sat in the very back, and during the boring parts Sam stole kisses and pointed out ridiculous lapses within the 1940s timeframe, just as promised. Afterward we hurried to the lake, falling into our elemental states as soon as we left the main path: the men muting to sparks, the women dissolving into shimmering slips of water, all to prevent the curious sight of so many people gathered around a lake at midnight for no reason to which they'll admit. Down at the bottom of the lake- moving from place to place through groundwater and ocean- lingered the two feminine spirits I had seen at the bottom of the pond on that terrible first day. The blue one, said to be the Lady of the Lake- the same one of Arthurian legend- would ask us most of the questions, but some would be asked by the reptilian one, who we called the Dark Mother. It was difficult to divide them too distinctly into categories of 'good' and 'evil.' I had seen instances of justice where the Dark Mother's argument was more pragmatic and fair-minded, less based on idealism or showmanship than her lighter partner's. But if a punishment needed to be meted out, the Lady always showed more restraint and mercy. A succubus could not be killed, but a punishment from the Dark Mother could easily make someone like me wish she had death as an option.

I moved to the edge of the lake, feeling the spark that was Sam hovering in the foliage just behind me. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time I heard the sound of my name spoken aloud in my mind, and I slipped down into the water. Once beneath it I felt my spirit body return to me: the same transparent paper-doll nature that had astonished me so many years ago, and still held the power to do so now.

At the lake's sandy bottom the two spirits hovered beside one another. Around the lady glowed a halo of white, like the haze around the moon, while tendrils of the Dark Mother's aurora fluttered at it like the torn edges of a cloak. Each time they delved a bit too deep the pale haze shone a notch brighter: and so it had been, year after year, ever since my first Midsummer.

I heard the Lady speak. "Do you have a partner?"

"I do."

A pause as this was recorded. Then: "What is your purpose?"

"To make children."

"Why?"

I spoke the words by rote. "For the continuation of the human race. A cambion cannot be killed by war, pestilence, or famine, yet will bear human children."

"Though sired by a demon."

"All creatures in their own way serve the Lord. Without us the Black Plague would have been the end of humanity."

The Lady and the Dark Mother flickered in approval. Then the Mother said, "Name the Rule."

I clasped my hands behind my back and lifted my chin. "Respect the illusion."

"Thank you. Does your partner abide by it as well?"

"He does."

"Good. Do you seek justice?"

This was my opportunity to report or complain of any aberrant behavior among my fellowmen: aggression, claiming of territory, attempts to injure my partner or offspring. A few times in my afterlife I had needed to make use of the chance to do so, but not this time. "No."

"Thank you," said the Lady. "You're free to go."

I raised my arms and ascended, feeling relieved to be in their good graces for another year. Often the incubi liked to remind us that they were fortunate not to be ruled at all, except via their association with us, but I didn't agree that that held any benefit. It was good, always, to know who was in charge.


	7. Chapter 7

Sam met me at the edge of the forest where it met the road. For a long time we walked side by side up the highway in companionable silence, musing on whatever information we had managed to gather at the Census. After a while Sam spoke up. "Meridiana has a new partner, I see."

I looked at him and frowned. "I didn't even see her there."

"Maybe she moved closer to me while you were in the lake. I was elemental, but I could perceive that it was her. And she was with Logan." He made a disdainful sound, as if coughing up something nasty. "Scraping the bottom of the barrel."

"Who is Logan?"

"A local free-ranger who lives in the abandoned school. He's not very old- I believe he died in the 1960s. Thinks he knows everything. I've had a beer with him a couple of times, and a couple was plenty."

"Young and cocky, I guess."

"Well, she's old and cocky, so maybe they're well-matched. At least if she drowns him it won't be too great a loss."

"Oh, _Sam_."

He bumped me with his shoulder, and I bumped him back. A car passed by us, its taillights disappearing into fog. Crickets sang in the trees. "Hey, your birthday is next week," he said. "We should go out dancing."

I snickered. "We don't know any of the dances they do at clubs these days. Dancing is the absolute _worst_ now, isn't it? It was _so_ much better back in your day."

"It really was."

"Remember the dances we used to go to? With the waltzes and reels. Oh, how I loved them. It felt sexy, but not in such a self-conscious way as now, you know? Feminine but not tawdry. I really miss it."

He grasped my hand and pulled me toward the empty street. In the center, just to the side of the double yellow line, he stopped and held my hand high, then bowed elegantly. When I giggled he straightened up and pulled me against him, one hand gentle at the small of my back.

"You remember how to waltz, don't you?" he asked.

"Do _you_?"

Without a pause he began leading us in light small circles of the dance. The dense midsummer air, suffused with a recent rain, felt cool against my skin. I smiled up at him as we moved across the asphalt so lightly that we seemed not to be bound to it at all. He said, "I miss you in a corset."

I laughed. "_I_ don't miss corsets for a _minute_."

"I liked feeling it under your dress and knowing I'd be the one to strip you out of it once the evening was done. It was like the dam between now and later." His fingers dug into my waist as if remembering the garment on their own. "I love you."

"I can tell."

He grinned, but then a pair of headlights cut through the mist and we retreated to the shoulder once again. "I'll see if I can find some real dancing that isn't too ridiculous," he offered. "Nothing that involves a bunch of ninnies speaking in fake British accents. I'm not sure I'll be successful."

"I appreciate the thought."

He planted a kiss on my cheek and draped his arm across my shoulders. We walked the rest of the way back to the factory as if we were a regular young couple, out too late, perhaps up to no good. And maybe- if I didn't think too hard- we almost were.

My birthday arrived with a bundle of pink roses held up to my face upon awakening and a banner, composed with only a pen and a strip of butcher paper cut into triangles, reading HAPPY RETURNS TABBY in Sam's anachronistic handwriting. When I rose from bed he handed me a birthday card composed of letters cut from the newspaper in the manner of a ransom note, spelling out a greeting:

HaPPy BiRtHDay tAbiTha

MaY aLL YouR fONDesT wiSheS be GraNtEd

YouR LOvINg HusBanD NoW anD FOReVer

S A M

Beside the chaotic writing was a sketch of a rose. I held up the card and, grinning, pointed out, "We're not married."

"I know. I was feeling romantic. It was probably an inappropriate choice, especially given how we'll celebrate." He rested back against the window ledge and said, "I couldn't find any decent dancing."

"I didn't think you'd be able to. That time is long gone, sadly."

"Why don't you visit Cameron tonight instead?"

I blurted a laugh. "Twice in a month? That's absolutely decadent."

"Go for it. I felt bad when I realized how long you'd held out just because of me and my preferences. I know how much you enjoy him." My cheeks tightened skeptically, and he urged, "Go on. I'll just visit the same woman again. She's not pregnant that we know of yet, so she's fair game."

"If you insist, I won't turn it down."

"I don't insist, but I encourage."

And so that evening I found myself in the back of a pickup truck once again, coasting toward Boston. In order to spend most of the day with Sam I had left unusually late, and when I arrived at the apartment building it was so dark as to appear abandoned. Yet this time I stalked confidently to his bedroom, feeling certain he would be there, and smiled when I saw him curled on his side, deep in the heart of sleep.

His cheeks were stubbly with a fair amount of beard, and it looked as though he were trying to grow one. As I slid into the bed, orienting my body to face him, I grasped him through his boxer briefs and felt that he was already stiff from dreaming. The mere feeling of him in my hand made me lightheaded with desire, but I couldn't be so immediate with my lust. That wasn't how dreams worked. And so I massaged his shoulders with feather-light hands, felt him stretch beneath my touch, worked my way down to his belly and then to his thighs. When he turned onto his back I lowered my face to his stomach and swirled my hair against it until he groaned and brought his fingers to grasp my skull. He ran them through the thickness of my hair, savoring it; his throat rumbled with a slow purr. Then, with an indulgent, instinctive motion, he pushed my head lower, and I opened my jaw to take him in.

I worked my mouth rhythmically over him for as long as I could, until desire had reached a fever pitch inside my belly and the taste of him warned me he was close to the edge. I came back up and lay on the bed, flat on my back, and gently tugged at his hand to see if he would follow. With another deep groan he rolled onto me, and for the first time in all these years I felt his full weight against me, his body surrounding mine, his thighs pushing my legs apart. Behind his closed eyelids I saw the flutter of movement; his long lashes twitched with hummingbird quickness against his cheeks, and he thrusted but in a disoriented way. I reached down and guided him, whispering in his ear: _Do you remember me?_

_Mmmhmm_, came his reply.

_Say my name_.

His voice, thick with sleep, was a low rumble. _You're the dream girl_.

He filled me up, almost too much. I ran my bared teeth along his arm, careful not to leave a mark. My senses were so full that the height of pleasure eluded me. I gripped at him with frustration, but when he began to moan in my ear- not once, but a steady rise accompanied by reaching, desperate thrusts- his bare and abject need was contagious. At the peak of it he pulled my hip tight against him, pressed the crown of his head into the pillow, and my own body let loose with a wild and unhindered riot of pleasure- a double handful of firecrackers thrown into the night air.

When he withdrew, it was slowly. The room had grown deadly silent after the frenzy of the past few minutes. The air felt cool against my forehead and throat, making me feel as though I must be sending up steam. His heavy body slumped beside me, and I curled back against his chest. For a few moments I lay still, gathering my wits; and then I felt his hand stroking down my stomach, my hip, down to the tangled curls between my legs still wet from our encounter. The motions were not clumsy or instinctive or idle. _He's awake_, I thought. _He's trying to figure out if I'm real._ I rolled away and began to gather my clothes from the floor, and when he turned and lifted his arm from his eyes, in the blink of an eye I disappeared into a puddle traveling across his floor.

In the foyer I stood up and slipped on my shoes- shoes, the nemesis of every succubus- then slid out again beneath the door. Sensing no bodies nearby, I rose to my feet again and hurried out of the building. Outside, rushing through the night air, my heart thudded in my chest. Dreamers almost never awaken on us. Once the human body has begun the climb toward pleasure, it ardently seeks to stay asleep so as not to break the spell; then, once sated, it grows drowsy and succumbs to the pull of unconsciousness once again. Maybe I had stayed too long, grown too complacent and comfortable in Cameron's bed. Maybe my visit, so close to the last one, had left him overly curious about the nature of such an intense dream. Or maybe- and I detested this thought- a terrible part of me wanted him to awaken and know I was real. It would be the height of disloyalty to Sam if that were true, and I couldn't abide the thought that perhaps I wanted that recognition and connection with another man, when Sam alone was the love of my life.

_You can't visit him anymore_, my mind told me savagely.

I felt tears pool in my eyes. Rather than suffer the indignity of feeling them fall, I cast myself into a puddle by the side of the road and stayed there for a good hour, forcing myself to remember what it felt like to be alone and isolated on some abandoned and anonymous road, rather than in the arms of a wonderful man, dancing.


	8. Chapter 8

I got home hours before Sam did. While I waited up for him, I settled in with the lantern and one of my paperbacks. I was rereading _The Witch of Blackbird Pond_, which was really quite accurate to New England in the 1680's and filled me with sympathetic triumph and horror. I knew a lot of people like Goodwife Cruff and Matthew Wood, and I enjoyed seeing them get their comeuppance.

Once I'd turned the last page of the book and Sam still wasn't home, I gave up, flicked off the lantern, and fell asleep. Not until almost morning did I awaken to a small commotion: Sam's footsteps sudden against the ground, then a loud clang as he stumbled against the discarded hubcap that lay near the stairs. My brow creasing with worry, I stirred and walked toward the staircase. Sam never tripped over anything. He could see in pitch darkness, and navigate obstacles at, almost literally, the speed of light. As he gripped the slim iron banister and started up the steps, I saw that his pace was arduous and his back bent as if under a heavy weight. My heart fluttered, and I hurried to his side.

"My God, Sam," I breathed. "What happened to you?"

He indicated the second story with a jerk of his chin, and I understood that he wanted to get to our little nest first. I wrapped my arm around his back and helped him walk, feeling around as inconspicuously as possible for bullet holes. But he couldn't have been shot, not like Alexander. When an incubus finds himself on the wrong end of a gun, nearly always wielded by an angry boyfriend or husband, he is instantly immolated; the force and combustion of the bullet destroy him the same way a backburn will destroy a wildfire. Usually his human female partner is killed by the same bullet, with no evidence left behind that another man had been in the room at all. There is no such thing as an incubus with a gunshot wound. He is healthy one moment, nonexistent the next.

Sam lowered himself to the blankets and curled up his side. I pulled a spare coverlet over him in a nervous protective gesture, and he seemed to welcome it. "Light a candle," he said. His voice was hoarse.

I grabbed the nearest pillar candle from a corner and held it toward him. He touched the wick between two fingers and it sparked to life. Its small glow seemed to soothe him, and he let out a shaky sigh. I held it up where he could see it and brushed his hair back from his eyes. The soft light flickered over his face, casting his skin in the warmest tones.

"I went to the same woman's," he began. "Like I said I would. I started in the woods and came in through the back like I did last time. I had my way with her. She seemed happy to see me again. _Loud_. And wild. She scratched up my back. Then I went to leave." His breath shuddered, and the candle flame leaped in response. "I left through the open window. As a spark, you know. But the wind gusts were poor, so at the edge of the woods behind the house I hit the ground and decided I'd walk for a while. I turned and looked back at the house, and that's when I saw something floating in the pool. I knew it was wrong. I knew right away that something was wrong."

I rubbed his shoulder, and he rocked his body a bit against the floor. "What was it?"

"I ran over and saw it was just what I feared. The girl, the little one. Cameron's. Floating facedown in her nightie. Everything was dark- of course _I_ could see, but nobody else would have. It was terrifying, Tabby. The most horrible thing I've seen since-" He shook his head. "The most horrible thing. Worse than the fire. I'm sure she hadn't been there on my way in or I would have noticed. The thought that I woke her up with what I was doing to her mother and set her wandering around-" His voice had climbed to a nearly hysterical register. "What an absolute nightmare."

Dread rested like a stone against my heart. "Well, what did you do?"

"I ran over and climbed the fence, then lay on my stomach beside the pool and reached for her as far as I could. I looked around for the skimmer her mother was using last time, but I couldn't see it. I didn't know what to do-"

"And you couldn't go in," I added. All of my chest felt cold, as if the magic of it was fading and turning me instead to ice. Sam and I had outlived so many of our children; we had seen our cambions grow old and frail, or die young and tragically, ever so many times. But such a scene had never unfolded before either of us; we only knew of it after the fact. Looking at his distant, traumatized gaze, I could hardly imagine how he must have felt to see one of his own dying in a pool of water just outside his grasp, knowing that to go into the water would mean death for him as well. He couldn't rescue her because he couldn't survive it himself.

"But I did," he said.

The sentence made no sense. I cocked my head in dismay. "What?"

"I can't get the water _inside_ my body, that's all. And I don't _like_ water, you know- no more than I would have walked across a bed of coals when I was human. But she was drowning, and so- I hardly even gave it a thought- I slid into the pool and walked through the water to where she was floating, and I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder. I was _drenched_. The water came up to here on my chest." With a hand he indicated a line not far below his neck. "I lay her on the concrete and pulled myself out of the pool. My clothes were so heavy, and the feeling was like- well, like being on fire. Every alarm in my mind was going off to warn me how much danger I was in. I turned the girl onto her side and clapped her on the back, and water flowed out of her mouth. I tried to tell by her temperature whether she was alive or dead, but I couldn't. She felt like- the same temperature as you. I don't know what that means, because I'm so warm. I've never touched a child so I don't know how they should feel."

I shook my head. "It probably doesn't mean anything good."

He drew his knees closer to his chest. "Well, I rolled her to her back and pinched her nose shut and breathed into her mouth. I don't even know if I exhale any oxygen, Tabby. For all I know I consume all of it. But it was all I could think of to do. And after I did that a few times she choked up all this water that went straight into _my_ mouth-"

"Oh, no," I gasped.

"And I spat it out and screamed. I really did. It was all so horrifying and I couldn't help it. This little girl, my cambion, dying in front of me, and the water on my skin, and the feeling of drowning, myself- I've never been so frightened. Then the patio lights flicked on, and the girl coughed and coughed, and so I breathed into her mouth a few more times. I heard a noise, and when I looked up the woman was running toward me. The mother. She was awake, and she looked me straight in the eye."

"And what did she do?"

"She started screaming. I realized then that I had just violated the rule- in fifty different ways, most likely- and so you and I both were probably both in a ton of trouble. I tried to spark away, but I couldn't because my fucking clothes- excuse me, Tabby- were too wet. So I ran into the woods, and then I _walked_ back, all the way from the other side of town. I heard sirens almost the entire way."

I reached beneath the blanket and felt his jeans. "Well, never mind about the rule. I'll bet you saved her life. And you feel dry now."

"Yes, I stopped under a bridge and took everything off and essentially torched it all dry with a pine bough. But I must still be too wet, because I'm not working right. My skin feels wrong, and my throat burns."

"Maybe you need to dry it out. Have a cigarette."

"My pack got ruined in the pool."

I left him on the blankets and retrieved the last of the bottle of wine I had opened with Meridiana. I poured him a glass, but when I returned with it he shook his head and held up a refusing hand. "I can't, sorry. The thought of any kind of liquid in my throat- _ugh_."

I set the glass on the window ledge and looked down at him shivering beneath the blanket. _Damn it all_, I thought, cursing in my mind the very nature of being what we were, where there was no handbook or counselor or any sort of guidance to help us share wisdom amongst ourselves or navigate our experience. We had only chance encounters with others of our kind, and tenuous friendships, and the occasional meeting with leaders more interested in enforcing a few ancient rules than in helping us get through our day-to-day lives.

"I'm going to try to find Meridiana," I told him. "I want to ask her what to do. Didn't you say her new partner lives in the abandoned school?"

"Yeah."

"Will you be all right if I leave you for a little while?"

He hesitated, but then nodded.

"I'll be back as soon as I can," I told him, and hurried out into the night.


	9. Chapter 9

I found Meridiana exactly where Sam predicted she would be- in a back room of an elegant but boarded-up brick schoolhouse, sketching pictures in a notebook to kill time. After I explained to her what had happened, I followed her back out to the street as she walked with rapid self-assurance. For my own part I couldn't be sure whether she really felt certain of what to do for Sam or only possessed a tremendous skill for faking competence at everything.

"He'll be fine," she told me as we turned down the block toward a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. "Just uncomfortable and anxious for a while. It's the Lady and Mother you need to worry about. Why on earth would he do such a foolish thing? He actually let his dreamer see him when she was awake? The leaders aren't going to like that one bit."

"He did it because the girl would have died otherwise," I explained again, trying not to sound irritable. "And we've all run into dreamers when they're awake. It happens all the time."

She gave a short shake of her head and pushed through the pharmacy door. The fluorescent lights made me squint, sudden and blinding. "It happens _out of context_. On the street or in a bar, and they presume they dreamt of you because they saw you by chance one day. You don't ravish someone and then let them see you five minutes later. That's completely against the entire structure of what we do."

"Well, he didn't have much choice."

"Of course he had a choice." She turned down the small-electronics aisle, picking up a little portable TV and two of the largest batteries on the shelf. "I know it sounds harsh to you. But you _will_ outlive every cambion. It would be nice if they were exempt from suffering and mortality, but they aren't. And there's no point in sacrificing your ability to create hundreds of lives in order to save _one_." She scanned the shelves and picked up a set of jumper cables. "I'm only being practical. Maybe thousands of years of experience has made me a cynic."

I shrugged. At my silence, she shot me a sly look. Her curly red hair flowed over her shoulders as if done up for her wedding day rather than a four a.m. drugstore run. I asked, "Who's paying for all this stuff, by the way?"

"I am. I know you two are permanently broke. You need a sugar daddy."

"Doesn't that violate the rule, too?"

"They turn a blind eye. They know we have to make a living somehow." She set all the stuff on the counter, and the male cashier offered her an over-eager smile. "What brand does he smoke?"

"Camel unfiltered."

She held up two fingers, and the cashier added the boxes to the pile.

Back at the factory, we hiked up the stairs and found Sam asleep beneath the blankets in the hazy early-morning light. "He's so cute," Meridiana observed. "I wonder how many times he broke his nose before he died. It really adds to his charm."

"He said he got into a lot of bar fights before the fire."

"It shows." She nudged him with her toe. "Sam. _Sammy_. Wake up and let's have a look at you."

He blinked awake and sat up, rubbing one eye with his hand. "Tabby," he said, as if Meridiana were not there at all.

"We got you your cancer sticks." She handed him the packs, but he looked at me and set them beside the candle. Sam only smoked outside so the smell wouldn't get into my hair and clothes. "And hey, look what I got you. Brand-new technology called 'the television.'"

"Very funny," he said groggily. "We don't have an outlet. That's why I don't have one."

"You don't need an outlet. There's a new trick going around." She took the television out of its box, then hooked one end of the jumper cables to each battery. Holding up the other two clamps, she said, "Let me see your feet."

"You're joking."

"You'll fry him," I said.

"Not with a lantern battery. Trust me, I've seen this done before." Tentatively Sam stretched out his legs, and she attached a clamp to each of his big toes. She handed him the plug for the television. "Now hold this."

He grasped it in his hand, and the tiny screen flickered on. Sam laughed. "I'll be damned," he said.

I offered an approving nod. "That's very innovative."

With his free hand he turned the dial from one channel to the next. "I love this," he murmured. "I can actually watch sports now."

"And the cambion birthrate in Lowell drops by half," Meridiana said, sotto voce.

He turned to a news channel, and a scene of a backyard pool flashed onto the screen. Sam straightened up. "This is it. That's the dreamer's house."

He turned up the volume, and atop a voice-over offering what we already knew, the screen showed a picture of Amberlie smiling on her mother's lap. My heart leaped to see her: that sweet oval face, open-hearted smile, and warm brown eyes. The shape of her jaw was the same as her father's, and I felt a swell of silly pride at what a fine man I had bedded. Then the televised voice deepened. "But that's where this story takes a strange turn," the newscaster said. "Copeland says she stumbled upon the scene of a strange man giving her child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the side of the pool. When confronted, he disappeared into the woods and has not been seen since."

The image switched to an ink drawing of Sam- and an astonishingly good one, at that. The prominent apple-cheeks and sensuous mouth were exactly right, and the artist had even managed to capture the narrowed, mischievous set of his eyes. "Wow, Sam," said Meridiana. "You really left an impression."

"God, I'm an unattractive son-of-a-bitch," he replied. "No wonder I have to take advantage of sleeping women."

I sighed. "You have animal magnetism."

Meridiana shrugged loosely. "You're an incubus. Your best side is in your pants."

"That is the truth," said Sam. "Too bad it doesn't get a forensic drawing." A phone number flashed on the screen for viewers to call if they believed they had seen him. "Wonderful," he said. "They want me for questioning. _Now_ how am I ever going to leave the factory?"

"You leave the factory once and you don't look back," said Meridiana. "That's how."

"They said Amberlie is still hospitalized," I said quietly. "I hope she's all right."

"Me too." Sam sat up and reached for a pack of smokes. "Excuse me for a minute."

As he made his way up to the roof, I looked down at the now-blank television and rubbed my arms as if I were cold. Meridiana's voice beside me was sudden and soft. "Now's a good time for you two to leave for a while," she said. "You know Sam wants to go anyway. Getting out of range of this story would save you both a lot of trouble."

"I think Sam should just lay low for a bit."

"He can't do that, Tabitha. Be reasonable. Four or five days stuck in here and he'll be explosive. You won't be able to handle him, and he'll be dangerous to any woman in his path once he _does_ leave. It's wonderful that you two have such a fine romance, but don't think for a moment that you'll be enough for him. He's still a demon, even if he's a nice one."

I breathed a slow sigh through my nose.

"And if I were you," she continued, "I'd get out of town to cover my trail for a while until you figure out how you'll justify this to the Lady and the Mother. Get to the vicinity of a different lake so that if they send out scouts to find you, you aren't making it easy for them by being in your place of record. If your whole rationale for staying here has been to keep Sam safe, your decision to leave should already be certain."

She patted my back, and I climbed the ladder to the roof. Sam stood on the concrete pad looking out toward the city, one thumb wedged in the pocket of his jeans. He looked pensive.

"How does your throat feel?" I asked.

"Better. You were right. I needed to dry it out."

I nodded. Hesitated. Then said, "I think we need to leave."

He squinted toward the sun and dragged on his cigarette. "I agree. I'm not sure how. I wish I had a car."

A voice behind us caused us both to turn around. "I might be able to get you one," said Meridiana. She stood at the entrance to the roof, perched on the ladder but with only her head above the rough cement opening. "The archdiocese gets rid of a few every year. I may be able to talk my sugar daddy into letting me have one."

"Are you consorting with priests again?" asked Sam.

"Go where the money is," replied Meridiana.

I gave her a skeptical look. "How long would that take?"

"It can't take more than a few days, so I'll push it. I'll ask tonight. If I put whipped cream and a cherry on top, he'll leave the keys out on his dresser tomorrow night and I can have them to you before morning."

Sam gave a quick laugh. "Boy, I wish I'd had you supplying me with _my_ wet dreams when I was fifteen."

"You couldn't have afforded me," she told him. "So lay low until you see me again. Sam, don't leave the factory, no matter how tempted you are, and Tabitha, don't let him. I hate to say this, but Sam, you're pretty easy to identify. And you're already in enough trouble without having to disappear without a trace from the county jail, with a booking photo on record."

He grunted in reply.

I put my arm around his waist, and Meridiana disappeared back down the entrance hole. He said nothing, and I wished I could tell him how proud I was of him that he had risked his own life to rescue Amberlie. But I knew that would be salt in the wound, because neither of us really knew whether he had rescued her, or only been the first to lay out her body for burial.


End file.
